Monday, August 15, 2005

Road Rash

Yesterday I decided to ride my bike. Often, I turn around at the Plains, but today I felt like going all the way to Nelsonville. It's 26 miles round trip, and takes me a little under two hours. I made it all the way to the end, and turned around to head back to Athens. About ten minutes into the return trip, I totally wrecked my bike.

I'm not sure what happened, there was nothing on the bike path that I could see. All I know is that I hit the ground really hard and skidded along the blacktop on my arm. I stood up and looked at my bike and tried to see if I could ride it and the whole front part was twisted to the side, and the chain was all mangled. I did a bunch of swearing, and then remembered that I had just seen Movie's 10 before I wrecked. I decided I could walk there, cross the stream and walk through the field to the theater. From there, I could call someone to pick me up.

As I was walking there, though, this couple on a tandem bike saw me and pulled over. They were so nice. They said, "first, let's make sure that YOU are okay. Then, let's fix up your bike!" The guy said he could fix anything. He twisted the frame back to shape and fixed my chains. Then they said I should use my whole bottle of water to wash out my cuts, and that they had extra water they could give me to refill. Haha, at first it was confusing because they asked me how far I had to go, and I said I lived in Athens right off the bike path. They looked worried and said, "you do know that you were walking towards Nelsonville, right?" and I laughed and said yes, that I had been thinking about walking to the theater. I said, "THAT would have been a bad sign, huh!?"

They set me up and helped me get going and I rode the 45 minutes back to my house. It didn't hurt too much because I wasn't stiff yet. The wind stung a little though. I came home and had Adam take some pictures of me. Then I cleaned out all my cuts and went over to Mom's to have her look at it. We went out to Peter's house (our doctor friend, Jason's dad), and he said I had done a great job cleaning it out. He said that if I HAD gone to the ER, they would have put some stitches in my elbow, but that I didn't need them. He said the most important thing of all was to keep it clean, and that I should soak it in the tub several times.

So I went home, did a little stuff to get ready for the week, and then settled into the tub. Adam made me a nice, stiff whiskey drink, and that made me feel better too. After the shower, we played some Trivial Pursuit and I had another whiskey, put some bandages over it to sleep in, and hit the sack.

















When I got home, I went to Mom's to get some supplies. Here's how the cuts look after a shower and a good scrubbing.









And here's a diagram that Mom made, detailing my leg injuries:

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